Falling Through Clouds, Falling Through Snow
by silentmusic16
Summary: "Be careful not to fall through the snow and the clouds." She said quietly. "It's almost impossible if you're not traveling with someone." AU oneshot, complete.


**It's a little more shipping-centric than anything I've written in a while, but I hope the story is interesting; I tried to make it so.**

**Enjoy~**

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Those bone white fingers of hers grazed my cheeks like a soft cloth and I couldn't help but sigh. We were sitting quietly in the corner of a cozy café, near the end of the night or the beginning of the morning, perspective wise. She was bundled in a brown sweater, black jeans and a little beanie hiding the rushed brushing she did so quickly to meet me out there on the border of night and day. In her blue eyes was tiredness, but she seemed alert enough after half a cup of coffee's caffeine filled her veins part in part with the blood it dispersed. Under my legs on the ground was my bag, packed and ready from the night before, and hidden from her sight. It felt heavier than it should be, haphazardly stuffed with my clothes and some goods, and I thought that perhaps it was because I was hiding it.

"So…" she looked everywhere but at my eyes.

"So." I returned.

"It's…uh, it's so early." She laughed her little giggle "Or maybe it's so late!"

Chuckle, chuckle. I chuckled at her corny jokes because it makes her after.

"I hate to draw this out. I really do. But…"

She started shaking her head a little, very slowly but noticeably. She looked up with tears and a sad smile.

"You don't have to say it; I understand. " she paused, collected her thoughts. "The snow outside – it's falling sideways. The wind is hardly ever this bad."

I was at a loss. Why would she be bringing up the snow? This was hard, this was so hard to tell her that I had to leave, that the big city was calling and I was going to make it, I was going to be somebody.

She turned her body then, more towards the large window to our side and her smile grew wider while tears began to flow a little more easily. Her legs crossed, knees close to each other under her dainty hands like she was a breakable porcelain doll. "I haven't seen wind this bad since I was a little girl."

Like the wailing of a widower's ghost, the wind screamed outside of the windows. Skeletal tree limbs whipped back and forth in the gusts, dancing to the song of the icy dead.

"I,uh I – " but she interrupted me.

"I was maybe 6, and the wind was whipping the snow around so fast it was like we were in a giant snow globe being tossed around in space. My dad told me that the snow was soft like a cloud, and if I went out and tried to play in it I'd fall through the sky forever and ever and ever. With this great big smile he hugged me and told me to always be careful not to fall through the snow and the clouds, and that it's almost impossible not to if you're not traveling with someone."

The world outside did resemble a snow globe, and the orange tinted glow of streetlights gave them an almost impure look from the rest of the cotton white snow piling quickly on the ground, like these pools of corruption threatened to eat through the earth itself. On the smaller buildings around the café, snow was collecting itself in sheets. She seemed so happy to observe all of this.

I reached out and tentatively put a hand on her shoulder. She didn't move, aside from a muffled laugh. Or a cry, perhaps. "I'm going out there, out to the city. And while I'd love to take you, I have to go this alone. The life of an author is a solitary one."

More shaking of her head, a smaller smile, but it was there. "Is it?"

"Yes. It's lonely and terrible and only through suffering can I learn the truest lessons of life."

"But what about the life lessons you can't learn alone?"

I had no answer, so I too, slowly, turned to watch the snow falling fast and hard out the window. A waitress came with seconds of our orders, and I drank the piping hot black coffee without waiting for it to cool down. Bad idea; my tongue was on fire and the coffee I spilled pulling the cup away from my mouth burned my cheeks too.

"Fuck!" I yelled, a little too loud. The waitress looked over, tut tut tutting her tongue. She looked to be around 25, a few years older than Nami and I, and her blue hair contrasted the serious personality she appeared to have.

My girl, ready for anything I guess, lightly dabbed a napkin on her wet tongue and used it to wipe off the burning liquid from my cheeks. Motherly, with care. Just like her. And there was triumph in her eyes. It was small, but it was definitely there.

"Listen," I said, "I only have a small, one room apartment and there's not much space."

"Is this the reason that you didn't move in with me last month when I asked you too? How long did you have this plan? The entire time we've been going out?"

I looked away, embarrassed. "A while, now."

"Were you stringing me along the entire time?"

I could sense the hurt in her voice.

"No. I just…you know that I never had a firm grasp on what I wanted to do in life and –"

"And I've stuck by you the entire time."

" – And I finally made my decision. It's a life that won't be rich or fabulous or anything. I'll be poor and hungry and desperate, searching for success."

"But if I've stuck by you this whole time, why would I stop because of something stupid like poverty?"

"The author's life is a solitary one – "

"Stop with that!" she yelled. I was taken aback for a second – she'd never yelled before. Never. "That's just your excuse!"

And she was right. She was totally right. I didn't want to look weak and desperate in front of her. I didn't want her to see the many failures before my success. And I wanted so much just to emulate my favorite authors. If they could earn success through misery, so could I, right?

We were quiet for a long time, both of us. The only sound was the assault of the whipping wind outside of the window. As the sky grew lighter and lighter the snow kept falling, but was nearly drowned out of sight by the light gray clouds. A few people walked into the store now that it was getting close to work time for most. A young, red haired girl, seemingly already doped up on sugar and caffeine, ordered a cappuccino. Two men argued about blitzball in a friendly way, both carrying identical briefcases for work. A couple holding hands, ordered a slice of pie and sat at a table away from mine.

She kicked the bag beneath my legs. "You're going to leave from here?" No clue as to how she found it.

"Yes. I'm taking the 8'oclock bus to the city." That was an hour away.

"By 'I'm', you still mean just you, don't you?"

"Nami, I'm sorry, I really am, but I need to do this. For myself I need to completely rewrite my life."

She looked down and those deep blue eyes of hers, the color of sapphires under the ocean, closed for a few moments before she stared back up at me. Absentmindedly she wiped a strand of hair behind her ear. Still more silence, although now I had her eyes peering at me with an emotion I couldn't grasp. Somewhere between painful understanding and unwitting resignation. As more people piled into the small and warm café, their voices gave rise to a background music of human creation. She started looking around, disconnected from the scene but somehow interested, like a god leaning back to examine its creation, and stopped looking directly at me. She'd look at the clock behind my head, or at my reflection in the window. And I too felt uncomfortable and guilty and terrible so I avoided her eyes like the plague.

When 7:30 rolled around I picked up my bag and my coffee, stood up from the table and pushed in my chair. Nami stayed seated, watching, observing. I didn't know what to say at this point. The pathetic little script I had wanted to follow failed spectacularly at the start of the conversation when I lacked the balls to just go ahead and tell this cute girl who loved me, and who I loved back, that I was going to abandon her for a misguided dream. But at the time, that dream seemed like the only important thing in my life. I might lose her at some point, I told myself, but I'd never lose my writing or my skills. And so, with the pragmatic powers of a drug addict I chose writing. With just a simple "Goodbye, Nami" I began walking towards the door.

Our seat had been close to the entrance, however, so even when she whispered I could hear her answer to the good bye I had just given:

"Be careful not to fall through the snow and the clouds." She said quietly. "It's almost impossible if you're not traveling with someone."

I didn't look backwards when I walked out, but I could feel her eyes on me the entire time. I could feel them my entire way to the big city like a ghost following me.

It wasn't long after I left my old town that I was sitting in my new small, dingy apartment, my "Author's Paradise" as I called it, when I was searching the obituaries for the name of the main character of the novel I was about to write (a novel that would never be completed in a long list of works never completed by me piled under windows and in the corner of empty rooms where they took on a life of their own just to die slowly, unused and unread and unwanted). As I was searching I came across _her_ name in small but bolded print. And the single line of the description mentioned her just falling, just descending like a star, through the clouds and the snow. It was deemed a natural death like any other, not a suicide, not a murder, not a massacre. A death along the lines of a car crash or a heart attack.

Awestruck, I sat back in my chair with what had to be a look of absolute horror on my face. The way the newspaper reported it, and later on the way witnesses told me, she really did just fall right through the snow and through the clouds in a way I couldn't even wrap my head around. Was her father right? Were those witnesses right? I never really learned for certain, but in my heart I believed it was true; the gravity in which she believed in the ability to do that was convincing, to say the least.

And so it was not long later that I went to her funeral, a closed casket one because there was no body to bury what with it falling falling falling through the sky and earth, and spoke to her father. A tall and intelligent man with jovial looking laugh lines, the frown he was wearing didn't fit him much (although I couldn't blame him for his pain). I somehow managed not to feel a thing, as if I locked my sadness and devastation in a cage and threw those feelings in a deep corner of my mind. Her father, having met me before and knowing of our relationship, took me to the side after the precession was over to talk to me.

"I'd just like to know one thing." He asked, with his gravelly voice full of seriousness.

"Anything."

"The last time you saw her; what was it that she said? I…I know she told you important things, and after the divorce with her mother, my daughter and I had sort of a…strained relationship."

With my voice barely above a whisper, I said "Be careful not to fall through the snow and the clouds. It's almost impossible if you're not traveling with someone."

All her father could do was choke down a sob, pat me on the back, and walk away. But I didn't deserve that pat or the respect. She had been traveling with me and I let her go the way a child did when they no longer wanted a balloon and watches it drift off into the distance forever, cold and alone.

The witnesses to her death tell me that when it happened, it was hard to comprehend, that it took them a lot of time to process it all. And from each one (an older man, the same redhead who walked into the café on the last morning I saw her, a dog walker) slight details differed. But the main story I could gather was this: Namine had been walking through the streets on a day similar to the one when I had left, and then, out of nowhere, she vanished. A few seconds later she was falling through the gravel gray clouds above, into the plentiful powdery snow on the ground and through the earth and existence itself. Life wasn't a cartoon, however, and there was no Nami-shaped hole in the ground. There was no slide whistle. She was there, she fell from above, and she, like a ghost passing through a wall, went right through the snow and the street into something beyond, be it eternity or nothingness.

She had fallen, as it was, through the clouds and through the snow while traveling all alone in the world. And then I too was traveling all alone, anxiously anticipating the single step that would send me plummeting through the clouds and the snow myself.

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**Actual criticism and reviews are appreciated. I hope you enjoyed the story.**


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